Classic Poem

As a devout Christian, my father
took delight and pride in being
(like Christ and the Apostles)
a Jew.
It was
Hasidic lore, his heritage,
he drew on to know
the Holy Spirit as Shekinah.

My Gentile mother, Welsh through and through,
and like my father sustained
by deep faith, cherished
all her long life the words
of Israel Zangwill, who told her,
" You have a Jewish soul."

I their daughter ( " flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone")
writing, in this Age of Terror, a libretto
about El Salvador, the suffering, the martyrs,

look from my page to watch
the apportioned news — those foul
dollops of History
each day thrusts at us, pushing them
into our gullets —
and see that,
in Lebanon
so-called Jews have permitted
so-called Christians
to wreak pogrom ( " thunder of devastation")
on helpless folk (of a tribe
anciently kin to their own, and now
concentrated
in Camps . . .)

My father — my mother —
I have longed for you.
Now I see
it is well you are dead,
dead and
gone from Time,
gone from this time whose weight
of shame your bones, weary already
from your own days and years of
tragic History,
could surely not have borne.